Rick Roderick on Nietzsche as Myth & Myth-maker [full length]

[Music] first lecture will be an introduction to n that I've called n as a myth and myth maker uh I'd like to say a little bit about his life because uh there's really not a too much to say about it it'll only take a few minutes I think to summarize he had a a really unexciting life uh and so that we need to distinguish right away two things one is what I like to call the N effect and I'm a child of the 60s so I'm very familiar with the so-called n effect and that's the effect uh that n has on adolescent young males who read him for the first time and begin to name their cars Uber MCH wagons uh and begin to quote N in order to uh to date women who dress in black as I'm dressed today and the N Fascination that characterizes one's first encounter and certainly uh characterized my first encounter with n as well we need to distinguish the N effect and also the effect of his texts from his life radically because uh his life is uh in my opinion you know from what I know about it extremely boring uh someone uh asked me before the class uh well was n gay well he wrote a book called The Gay science but uh he didn't publish it you know in San Francisco or anything and it's not about guys uh n probably only had one sexual encounter in his life it's likely that that encounter uh that that that he contracted syphilis in that encounter so this is hardly the subject for a miniseries I mean this won't make it to Dallas uh he uh he was a brilliant young man who got a job teaching in a German University uh at a very very young age in fact uh if you know the German University system a remarkably uh young age but because of migraine headaches and problems with faculty meetings uh things that I'm very familiar with uh he quit and traveled and wrote books so in a certain important sense uh the books that I will be talking about the texts that I will be discussing are his life and uh so questions about his biographical history I'll give you just an outline because uh n in an important sense is the last thinker of the 19th century and also in another important sense that I'll be arguing I hope throughout the course one of the most important thinkers for our present moment but uh n was born in 1844 uh in Germany of course I I only talk about Germans I guess this is uh established uh policy now right to concentrate all our policy on Germany Japan and the Soviet Union and he was from one of those three he was from Germany uh he had a rather famous but brief friendship uh with the composer Vagner uh that's about the most exciting thing so you know I'm not going to say much about it but he had a famous friend uh he he wrote a lot of books that we'll talk about uh he was raised uh by his uh mother his father was a a minister rather sickly person uh as he was throughout his life so if any of you have had some brief acquaintance with n and the doctrine of the affirmation of life and all the uh hyperbole about health and the Superman that appears in his text it would be a shocking contrast to have uh met the real nature at one of the little rosart towns where he used to hang out and find this Dapper rather quiet European man who was extremely ineffectual this was wouldn't be your your view of Superman uh for sure uh anyway n uh the N that we know in the texts uh isn't dead yet the n's writer but uh n died in uh 1908 I I'm sorry in 1900 on the nose which is nice if you're a historian and you like to periodize he died at the end of the 19th century but as some of you may also know uh n went mad 10 years before that uh much to the Delight of various commentators and uh Christian commentators and and others who argue that anyone who took uh some of the extreme positions and series of positions if one wants to attribute them to Nature uh about God you know the argument is that you know you'll go mad or you'll change your mind in a foxhole or whatever so his madness has been a consolation to many and uh uh and certainly it was a consolation to his sister who made the most obscene uses of him afterwards uh by the The Familiar picture we have of n as a person is if you look at this portable n which I suggest to everyone as the first encounter you should have it was sort of designed for that you may have seen other books in this series The portable so and so and so and so and so and so and so and so well this actually is is an excellent little text but look at the the sort of sketched in picture of n with the big mustache and well this is the way his sister uh would had him wear his hair and dressed him during his life he had very short hair no beard no very Dapper and his sister had him goow out this sort of profit like beard and dressed him in a cloak and then would bring people in to show them her famous brothers very Germanic it's just strange here is nature you know beard clo so I'm not going to again I'm not going to say much about his life because his life was a pathetic ruin his texts on the other hand have not uh suffered the same fate that he did as an embodied suffering human being uh to approach uh the text of nature is difficult and this format adds one additional Paradox to uh the paradoxes with which we're about to begin uh there are at least two sets of paradoxes uh that concern n as myth and myth maker the first are those paradoxes that are within his writings for example and we will cover these as the courses go on uh n will suggest that morality has an immoral origin that rationality has an irrational origin that truth has its origin in fiction and so on so those are the paradoxes that we will deal with within the text of n those are paradoxes that that any interpretation of n would have to address any interpretation of his work would have to address those and uh my task of doing a course on N would be difficult enough if I just had to address those those are tough uh the second sets of paradoxes uh make it even uh more of a problem and that's the uh the the Paradox generated by what might be called generated by his writing instead of the paradoxes within it the Paradox generated by his writing by his pluralism of styles he wrote in fragments afro isms jokes all kinds of metaphoric tropes he also wrote treatises and in fact in in a plurality of different styles many of them the most famous and most disgusted ones are in these Shar either Parables or afro isms which are hyperbolic exciting brilliant and have as I say received a lot of attention but the Paradox generated by his writing is that the clear sense emerges from n's uh project that it is and this will be a central issue now I'm not saying we're going to settle this in here for God's sakes because I don't know if it's settleable the central issue of his writing will be the so-called impossibility of interpreting and many of the issues we're going to discuss are going to concern interpretation so please don't think that interpretation here is a special philosophical term I want to try to bring home to you the Practical importance of interpretation and then I'll return to the Paradox uh we interpret all the time I mean whether you know we we don't interpret in the specialized doly s but we interpret all the time when we look in a mirror when we dress in the morning and uh and you may notice that we are similarly dressed I mean you know if an anthropologist would notice that we were that we shared much more in common in our dress than we than differences uh there are many background conditions and interpretive conditions that go into dressing presenting one's Persona and so on there are many background conditions and interpretations that go into an act as simple as stopping at a red light now we don't call all these interpretations up and explicitly discuss them but there was a time when you didn't know to stop at red lights there's an entire set of traffic regulations mutually adhered to which embody all kinds of legal interpretations and that's the background gets which even a simple act like that will be performed interpretation in a more obvious sense takes place in the Poli political realm all the time so if you followed the Clarence Thomas hearings and I've promised in these lectures not to go off on my political digressions so I I'll try to keep this one brief but if you followed the Thomas uh Judge Thomas hearings you'll notice that questions of interpretation arose again and again in a quite practical context by that I mean something hung on what he on both what he interpreted he had said in the past and on how he would interpret in the future so interpretation is very important this can also be made clear historically although we don't uh make a big deal out of interpreting the Bible anymore we we adopt a kind of Live and Let Live attitude based upon our real smudgy belief in God now that USA Today belief you know they asking USA Today how many Americans believe in God and 98% say well yes uh in in the in the normal American factoid way of believing it's just you ask if you do and you don't want to be embarrassed sure yeah but there was a time there was a time in the history of of Western Civilization when people burned because they read a book with the wrong interpretation I want you to understand interpretation a lot depends on interpretation because they interpreted that the Bible the biblical text wrong whole groups of people might burn so so so there Stakes to interpretation so as we discuss this throughout the course please don't think that this is some Airy stupid academic dispute in fact I would argue that the last 10 years of political life have been about the attempt to kill the very desire to interpret in a certain way it's to it is the the there's been a certain trajectory social trajectory which the text of n addresses that in involves accepting surfaces and to kill the urge to interpret in anything but the most superficial way and that will be part of the social and political aspect of the argument I will develop okay now no no thinker and and I'm going to avoid calling n a philosopher the reason is that I know a lot of professional philosophers and I don't want to Sully n's memory in this way uh n uh the writer we will call him a kind of writer uh is importantly engaged in interpretation that will lead us not only into these contemporary issues and into theoretical issues but he but he won't stay with just theoretical issues they will be profoundly importantly practical issues okay well now back to the second Paradox uh n's work suggests that in a certain sense it may be impossible to find what many people think they find when they interpret namely the right interpretation one of n's primary targets is the notion that there is such a thing as the right interpretation in general that's what makes it a theoretical point however the Paradox now is obvious right because the Paradox generate by his writings is if that thesis suggested by his writings were correct then the ideal way to present nche would not be to present an interpretation of n but to do what He suggests in other places in his work which is to develop a creative brilliant performance of One's Own that sort of created oneself in a new way and if one used n's name it wouldn't matter whether one or it might matter if it made the performance better in what way one used it but that's a very peculiar way to look at a book in other words a series of texts that suggest that there's an impossibility in getting them right and it's not what we standardly I think most of us standardly believe we do when we interpret I don't know how many of you are familiar with things like Southern Baptist conventions I don't attend them but they take interpretation very seriously and when they debate it someone's is right generally the persons who just offered it arguing with someone else but I mean the the the underlying idea is that interpret that that an interpretation can be the right one especially in regard to a text like the Bible uh this is an a deep uh belief that also runs throughout universities and has generated a current debate at the universities over the losses of standards and objectivity because according to for example Alan bloom in the clothing of the American mind and according to Buckley and many other uh conservatives now labeled Neo most of them have gotten older and as they get older they're now called Neo I will drop that I will call them paleo conservative paleo conservatives uh uh find in n a very troubling feature of a figure because because of this effect generated by his writings that interpretations are multiple contestable and might finally be judged by which end up being the most interesting on the other hand they might be some interpretations might be in place simply because they are backed by the most power point we'll get to in a later lecture that many interpretations may be in in place not because they're IR rational or argumentatively supported but simply because they're backed by the most power uh once this Spectre has been raised about interpretation in general then it looks like we we we have attained a sort of insight if we do and we're going to have to follow the text of n for which I'm just preparing us now if we do think this as an insight and follow it out it seems to make the university a very you know odd place because then when the uh the uh philosophy Professor puts his Plato notes on the board or her Plato notes on the board uh the student has no reason to think that that's any more interesting than their own notes based on their own reading apart from the institutional power of the person presenting apart from that uh well this is the notion of course that's outraged Bloom because this destroys standards well whose standards well of course people like him academics their standards it reminds me of the scene in Full Metal Jacket where the drill instructor says it's okay to believe in God when you're in the Marine Corps your heart can belong to Jesus but when you're in the Marine Corp you play our games we play our little games they play their little games you know God plays his little games he loves Marines that's not the actual line I can't do it here he loves Marines we keep his you know heaven filled with souls and so he lets us play our little games well academics are kind of like that drill instructor and if it turned out that they didn't have some special this is in the humanities in particular but the argument might even hold across many areas of science but I hope you follow the point if academics didn't hold a certain key to interpretation that their students needed to decide decipher and pay money in order to learn to decipher they wouldn't have anything to do for a living do you follow me they wouldn't have anything to do for a living and I I I don't want to to make that sound crude but on the other hand I don't want to lie it is crucially important in the political economy of the university to try to deny n's insight for this reason if it is one we will argue that because if it is one it's paradoxical because it will mean that what I'm now saying and the lessons I'm drawing from this Insight which is that interpretation may prove to be undecidable or impossible or whatever if that is an inside the challenge it poses is that people would have to begin their lectures by saying things like this I'm paid a lot of money and I have tenured a very famous place you will Now take notes instead of beginning with this is my methodology carefully developed over years of study in other words one would begin to see then what n suggests in text after text which is that the origins of such methodologies are in relations of power that the methodological languages however sophisticated will in some sense instantiate those institutional Powers Trace to their Origins they will themselves proed to rest upon undecidable and interpretable material and not upon the facts themselves so it will be a consequence of the effect of n's text to make us at least question whether we can come up with the right interpretation of a text of a situation of a person I mean interpretation again to try to make it concrete and not some academic matter interpretation is very important for for example you've fallen in love for the first time and you and things have been going great and then one night you're you're out and you look and the person frowns for a few minutes and whole train of interpretations may start off that are humanly important this is not you know grad school this is stuff you want to know about what is this frowning business it's been going great I don't know what the frowning so interpretation a rich human matter and not a theoretical matter okay now let me get back to my to my starting points the first one we'll have to deal with the text generated by Nicha specific positions and the work within his writings and we will do that that the second of the is the Paradox generated by his writings the Paradox what I call we'll call the Paradox of interpretation one which I have not yet spelled out each's case for but I will as we go along and then now now we come to the third and for me most interesting Paradox which uh arises from my own situation here lecturing on n in a new medium at the trajectory of a culture that n saw as one that was leading to what he referred to as nihilism the last man the death of a certain form of Being Human and to present that to present the first set of par paradoxes and then to try to give you a sense for the Paradox generated by his work and then thirdly to do it from this position and in this context and in this culture presents for me a third and deeper personal subjective Paradox because on the one hand I don't want to leave uh the text of n as The Possession as a sort of esoteric possession of snoody Elites not happy with that on the other hand I don't want it to lose its striking Power by being somehow trivialized in the process of presenting it which puts me in a third position and I guess that given also the second one it generates another problem which is why am I here doing this instead of one of you so I have to give an answer to that right away and I'll start with a blunt one and that's that I've probably read more of this than you have that that would be the answer you'd get from your mechanic about fixing a carburetor well i' I've read the carburetor book I've fixed these things you go well I've never fixed it you go okay you try to fix it this time so there's one analogy and if one of you has read more then you can come up here now it's okay I mean I won't be offended just whatever uh I'll have to leave that joke out we'll cut that one uh anyway uh another kind of example might be this uh doing n might be something like housework just something that has to be done over and over again not trying to denigrate the unwaged labor under Capital performed by women that's how I describe housew work unwaged labor valorizing Capital done by women unwaged uh but I don't want to put housework down because I think that's it should be waged at the very least we it should have a wage but uh in any case uh it it may be that that interpreting need will have to be something like housework work to be done over and over again by a whole series of people who read and reread n in other words I won't be up here trying to claim the authority of n for anything I will be making a kind of use of it now that won't Release Me From the full Paradox as you'll see as we begin to look through his word in fact we'll just have to deal with a lot of paradoxes as we look through his work and for people who enjoy neat and tidy lecture courses that have a lot of demonstrative arguments with conclusions that are necessary this is really the wrong morning or afternoon for you to have shown up because that will not be what n offers what n offers is a lot less if you're a professional philosopher today by that by that I mean a lot less being no arguments that could be symbolized in and then put into one of our jour journals which are read by 11 people who if they were all killed on the same bus no one then would ever know about the journal again 11 people read some of these things or 12 if you're popular uh in any case those are those are the three sets of paradoxes text Paradox within the text Paradox generated by the reading of N and then the third the Paradox that belongs to anyone who attempts to present n's text okay now I'll uh that's uh that's a an an introduction to what I will do now uh the first topic and it's listed in the lecture is myth and one of the things that n is among many other things and now that I say n is the n as proper name refers not to this pathetic little man you know his terrible little life but to the text of n okay remember that i' I've made that distinction and and I'll try to explain that one too as I go along but uh one of the things that we need to to look at as we go through that that myth will be one of the topics of the text of nature that's very important and it won't be that n discusses myth in detail although frequently he does discuss myth or that he uses myth in his writings which he not only does but in the case of uh of uh of Thus Spoke zarathustra he creates one of his own quite beautiful quite brilliant I'm sure some of you have heard uh at least uh you know there's a piece of music based on it you're probably familiar with the Prelude to it which opens 2001 of Space Odyssey sort of uber MCH Overman Prelude anyway myth is not only you know used by him he doesn't only create one but the topic of the relationship between myth and what some other philosophers have called modernity Modern Life I'm sometimes tempted just to Simply call it capitalism and usually Will Modern Life to try to make that come alive you need to think about films like Charlie chaplain's modern times you know you have a sort of pastoral life kind of pastoral forming and stuff and then all of a sudden real fast machines it's one way to visualize modernity another way is in the text of kfka these lines of bureaucrats faceless little Joseph K wandering towards an impossible Justice that's another way to imagine it a way to theorize it is to read thousands of pages of Max vber bore you to death boring but it will help you theorize it uh so modernity is connected importantly connected with the enlightenment uh and we will have to discuss nich as an in a certain very important sense involved in what I will refer to as the dialectic of Enlightenment he will be involved in both a critique of the Enlightenment a criticism of it but then he will of course make use of its insights at the same time and the critique of Enlightenment that that n originates accounts for the title of the overall lecture series which is the postmodern condition because if in any sense at all we are either in or headed toward a situation after Modern Life or postmodern a term that some of you are familiar with then certainly an important figure will be n both for the myths that he constructed about such a life and for the myth I just constructed that he may have had a role in constructing such a life because that's probably a myth as well okay uh now the importance of nature I mean this is now we're going to do a little a little standard academic treatment here uh the importance of nature uh one of the reasons that I selected this course is because it's always good to discuss a thinker uh who's discussed in Time Magazine and becomes the topic of routine poic on Buckley and elsewhere that's important because that's a part part of our objective culture it's a topic for conversation and that makes your remarks more understandable and gives a real social purpose to doing it so nich's importance is in a as I said in a sense obvious nich is the main target in Bloom's book he is the the study of n along with I think looking at Woody Allen films let me try to locate the fall of Western universities in bloom okay I just I if Mr Bloom's in the crowd I'm sorry but anyway uh uh nature and German philosophy mainly nature Woody Allen films and the dark music from Africa that started influencing American Youth sort of we don't want to call anyone a a racist but but that that sounded funny to me when I read it in the closing of the American mind this dark music of Africa you know what could he be talking about you know well I mean we all know that MC Jagger looks like a photo negative of Little Richard but I wondered what he was what he was talking about in any case there's uh the neoconservative attack the Paleo conservative attack on N uh makes it an interesting topic of debate in one sense the current uh debates over uh interpretation in in the areas of law politics and elsewhere make him an interesting figure to discuss and then there's this uh issue of n's return which I would like to to make his historically contextual for you I discussed being a product of the 60s my first encounter with him and many young people encountered him at the time and it was exhilarating because as we read through these texts we will see that n is always valorizing youth creativity life affirming activity always valuing misinterpretation politically hyperbolically you know inside in people to life at Authority and so on and uh so there was a great exhilarating effect of n in the60s which I think sort of washed out in the 70s early mid late 80s the way most things did kind of settled into sort of a 30-some [Music] whining I I mean I don't know the people who make that show I'm sorry but I mean I watched it a few times and it was just just you know suicide please anything but this you know I mean Abby Hoffman whatever anything but this whining pathetic pale shadow of a human life you know but then a younger generation comes along and we have what's called n's return and this this began in the late ' 80s and the return to n at first was quasi nostalgic and then it became humorous and I also want to bring some of that in because because there are many humorous and and I mean it would be absolutely out of the spirit of n not to do this there are many humorous uses for the text of nature uh there was an issue of simia text magazine which I really enjoy I don't know how many of you have ever even seen semia text but it's a bizarre little uh out ofthe way Journal that uh publishes all kinds of strange esoterica on the edge of the academic discourse bizarre conspiracy theories strange political theories and they did an issue on N that began with a box that checked off a style of interpreting n and it it's the first one was Shameless opportunist you know the second one was Joker who's never read n third was serious but confused academic and you just checked off your box and mailed in the result of the survey to s a text after having read some of the articles on the new n and actually the the the thing that was the most in the spirit of n in the whole issue was that box because n has a tremendous and I mean one of the one of the reasons that one can stand n at his darkest moments in his text one reason that one can tolerate looking some of n in the face and and being able to stand it is because of these moments of incredible hity I mean just absolutely hilarious I'll try to generate some of those as we uh read through here because uh n uh does uh uh I think in uh as as we proceed we'll we'll see that n isn't a place to go for consolation you know this is not a place one would go for consolation is you wouldn't pick it up like one of these Feelgood pop psychology books that I find in the airports all the time for every group imaginable you know unbelievable culture books for depressed Housewives ages 25 through 31 I didn't know you needed a book you've got eight talk shows why' you need a book books for depressed husbands ages 27 through 40 so on and just everybody depressed and these are well n's texts are not a place to go for consolation along along any of those dimensions in fact one of the things that will be importantly denied in my account it may just be mine but in my account of nature will be the very possibility of anything like a psychology as anything more than just one more narrative about yourself that you decide to adopt I mean you can do that right I mean in fact it's disheartening today how frequently you meet someone a few years later and oh no I'm off the valum now you know I'm I'm in the Reverend moons church and and I'm off the valume I mean who knows uh people today what n saw is an incredible project which was to invent oneself now is a marketable thing I mean that at the mall you can go to the Gap and invent a Persona read a few of the right magazines that go with the clothes that you buy the Gap and so on so self-creation in an intensified Market economy is something that n would have had to deal with had he unfortunately lived longer but he claimed to have lived out of season and I will claim that that his view is relevant to our own times now let me return for a moment to this interpretation business and uh and then a few quotes from N I think that we should use a little nature you to spice up the the opening uh we've talked about these three sets of problems three paradoxes including my Paradox of trying to present this both by doing Justice to the wit the interpretation developing my own strong interpretation and doing it under a changed mode of communication which is extremely important to n he's a writer a writerly writer uh he's been referred to as someone who wanted to play Plato to his own Socrates let me explain that remark briefly and this may help introduce you to n a little bit playing Plato to your own Socrates would mean this Socrates didn't write anything some of you may know that Socrates didn't write Plato wrote about him so it was as though Socrates sort of lived this character that comes down to us in the constructed form of Plato's narrative about which it has always seemed to me to be totally uninteresting to ask was that really what he was like for God's sake that's a we don't we don't even normally want to know that really I mean if you've seen a great Billy the Kid movie and there and there have been so many that a few of them have had to be good right you see a really good Billy the Kid movie it's not fun to go was Billy really like that I mean who cares you know I mean because that one was interesting and fascinating so Plato Socrates is such a fascinating character I'm not sure what so was really like there are reasons I think and N makes some of them clear why in principle I couldn't be sure about that part of our fascination with time machines might be with interpretation actually maybe our fascination with time machines you know like Back to the Future back to the past and now Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures through time uh I like some of those but I'm I'm digressing a bit but forgive me here uh Bill and Ted's latest uh bogus Adventure is a parody of ingar bergman's the seventh seal where they go to hell and play Twister and Battleship with the devil instead of Chess that will be a symptom of a post-modern culture see modernist humans will be worried about death it will reverberate in sort of their being and because there won't be a field of meaning to answer it the problems of life and death we will get the problem called nihilism but when you cross a certain threat threshold point a a threshold point where people's real issue is am I alive now and that question seems radically undecidable then you get cultural artifacts like Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure where the best response seems to be a kind of giddy silly ecstasy at the very inability to have a self I mean I and I can't say that I don't share some of the fun of it for our younger generation of quasa cyborgs that will be raised in this postmodern culture they will be unrecognizable perhaps within a few Generations every oh well that's impossible let me uh try to generate this kind of historical change that nature was one of the first to foresee and to discuss and which I will discuss throughout this course Under The Heading of nihilism and that will be the social and exponential side of the problems of inter ration although they're also exponential to me and that's uh the problem of nihilism is the problem of finding meaning in a world that is no longer god- centered that did not mean for n any more than it did for Marx or vber or the other people who gave accounts of Mo Modern Life that there would no longer be a lot of religious people you follow me and it didn't mean that there still wouldn't be churches and believers and there still wouldn't be Holy Wars and so on it meant that an overarching cosmological story into which you could fit that provided a background of meaning and a place for you would be radically missing and in its place there would be Market relations in which what you were would amount to what you do for a living so all a lot of you know about me I do have a couple of my ex- students in here but all a lot of you know about me is that I do University stuff for a living see that's and that isn't a remark about my predilection which is something I've talked about before this is over my predilections it's a mark about my profession but it's more than that under these social conditions it is an absolutely ontological remark about what I am now when people at a dinner party say what do you do that is not a trivial remark it's a story about a culture what do you do answers what you are now I know people resist this and I enjoy the resistance you dinner parties you go well I'm a writer almost a joke if you're a dinner party in New York I'm an artist I'm a performance artist I'm ride I'm and you find well but I mean you what do you do they go I'll drive a cat I white tables but I'm you my third novel is I'm working on it yeah no this this is a culture this full of Market relations where the construction of meaning becomes the burden of a newly constructed category the individual the bis individual the individual of Modern Life the individual competitor on a market in a market no longer the member of like the community of God in the broad sense you know of the feudal period but someone who must construct the meaning of their lives in Singularity let me say that instead of alone with their you know sort of ins singular with their own resources and that is a task that Max vber thought would overburden them and it's a task that n thought almost impossible but one he undertook as I said earlier by trying to become Plato to his own Socrates in other words not to actually live an interesting life like Socrates but to write one as though he had lived it a kind of deferred relation but still to make meaning out of his own life in a context and this again this word nihilism I'll I'll say a little bit more about in a context where the threat was nihilism a culture where there was no fabric from which to construct meaning now nihilism uh in a certain way then won't be used by me to describe a philosophical position because to the extent it does it's supposed to be some silly position like this niis nihilists are people who believe in nothing well if that's what nihilists were there wouldn't be any and that's not what we're diagnosing we're diagnosing a nihilistic culture where no enduring beliefs can provide meaning for the overwhelming majority of members of that culture that's the problem that n identifies coming along with Modern Life and also not coming along as a mystification but coming along as part of the inside of Modern Life comes along with Darwin in other words being demystified about our Origins it comes along with a new view of the cosmos being demystified about the importance of the earth you know where it is and how big it is and in the center of what being demystified concerning a whole series of things about which earlier there were powerful important meaning giving myths part of the work of the Enlightenment was this destructive work of destroying myths that was the work carried out by the bis class and by ideologues I mean it's not bad I mean you remember they said we won't have a decent world to live in until the last priest has hung on the guts of the last king and stuff I mean well those are the MS of the great revolutions this is Washington DC right these are the great bis revolutions we love them and they may be in fact a world historic Destiny n's worry was that this kind of domestify would lead to a situation in which human beings will willed only not to will any longer who wanted sort of only not to want any longer and N saw this emerging culture as one that would be enemal to human life about which as I said he doesn't have a lot of consoling things to say so I'm going to I'm going to read a little passage of Nature and and uh try to stop there for the to give us a frame with which nature views human beings now I don't think this is all that theoretic uh and I don't want it to be I want it to be something that you can grab a hold of and understand because this is kind of a modern myth I'm about to to spell out for you in fact I may not read it I may just gloss it it's a modern myth that I'd like to spell out for you that many of us believe and let's see after we've examined this myth if this is more or less comforting than the beautiful myth of redemption and say for example the Bible uh the myth is something like this there are billions and billions of stars the Earth is a tiny one we crawl across it for just a few seconds and then we individually are gone billions and billions of eons of time before and billions afterwards pass and the earth eventually goes out like a cinder and perhaps the whole Universe collapses into itself and after all that's happened absolutely nothing will have been done now that's a very important myth many of us believe that one too but against that background it becomes difficult as we chip away at our daily Little Lives selling shoes selling tires teaching class to try to find any damn thing that means anything so our search through n will not be a search for dogmatic answers to that question but to follow his quest and ours for a form of self-creation under circumstances and with a background of myths that do not make it seem likely that we will have a happy result the end of my first lecture is that our interpretive efforts here too are bound to fail

Channel: The Partially Examined Life

Views: 93,527

Keywords: Friedrich, Nietzsche, Full, Rick, Roderick, philosopher, philosophy, postmodern, condition, morality, moralist, immoralist, ethics, myth

Id: kjFiU9nDQD4

Length: 47min 21sec (2841 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 28 2012